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Have you noticed how those stories are always an adult male author and a teenage girl? It’s almost as though men feel threatened by women and girls showing them insufficient deference and having independent opinions, even when the girl in question has literally no power to affect the man’s life.

How awful. And what a surprise, the main character in his book (the ‘perfect princess’) is based on a letter he wrote on Valentine’s day to a woman whom he was ‘benevolently stalking’, who eventually had to contact the police about his behavior. Ugh. Just Ugh.

One cool thing that happened recently was in my mope of not having anything to play Fallout 4 on I picked up a collection of old genesis games for the PS3. I started playing the first Phantasy Star game and was pleasantly surprised to discover the main character was a female.

I’m watching 8 out of 10 Cats does Countdown and I’m paraphrasing but Jimmy Carr uttered the most absolutely perfect thing ever — I feel like that was very much an IKEA sentence, all the parts were there, just not in the right order.

I am so stealing “IKEA sentence”, that’s everything that NWO said — the words were there, they just made no sense in that order; also works for back ways forwards slips, and Yoda.

– The audience was laughing at Trump when he went into his usual script about “we’re losing to blah blah, we’re losing to blah blah, we don’t win anymore” and “I’ve created bilions and billions and billions of jobs”. He’s also fucked.

– Rand Paul got both massive cheering and boos, like always.

– Winners of main debate: Carson, Fiorina, Rubio.

– Rubio will probably be the nominee.

– Cruz was pointless.

– As far as I can tell, Christie promised to go to war with China and to let the police kill as many innocent people as they want.

– Huckaburger did ok in the kids table debate.

– The early debate was nothing but tedious bickering and repetitive nonsense.

– Biggest boo of the night was in response to the moderator accurately stating Hillary’s resume. They’re booing facts.

Well heck, looks like my computer might be just barely able to run Fallout 4, so now I’m seriously considering getting it on console. I’ve got plenty of other games with which to retreat to my computer.

We’re planning on getting a PS4 next February or March, after our tax return comes in.

I’m sorry, I don’t know if this is the right thread for this. I just wanted to give you a PSA.

Do not put install the Photobucket app on your phone. They advertise it as a photo backup app, but PB is a photo SHARING site, and their default settings are to make everything you upload totally public. Even if you make a library or album “Private”, the photo still shows up in PB’s “Recents” page, it just makes it so a person can’t follow the link and see the rest of the album. There is a subreddit with thousands of subscribers that watch the “Recents” page for people who upload things they don’t realize are public, then repost them elsewhere like Imgur. It’s sickening. Neither Reddit nor Photobucket seem to care. And even if Reddit did close them down, they’d just go somewhere else. The problem is Photobucket. So please, spread the word. Do not use PB to backup your personal photos.

@Falconer re: sharing gaming with your SO: It’s the best 😀
And I look at it this way: It’s a helluva lot cheaper than going out! Especially if you have to factor childcare into the equation.

re: a console: There’s apparently a PS4 bundle out right now that includes Fallout 4 😡
But post-holiday / tax return specials are good, too.

@dhag: Games really are a time suck, but, meh, gotta have some vices.
Mine include playing videogames and a teeny touch of sloth, at least if that sloth involves brewing some coffee and curling up under a blanket to read for entirely too long…or wishing that that could happen more frequently.

@dhag85:
I got the same impression. The fanatics have shifted from Trump to Carson, which is both worrying and annoying: worrying because he’s less openly absurd and so stands more of a chance, and annoying because I have a bet riding that Trump will win the nomination.

I agree with what EJ said; Carson is less openly absurd. However, when Donald speaks it’s just empty bragging and nonsense catch phrases. When Carson speaks it’s always things that make you go “wait… whaaat?”

So what would a Trump presidency actually be like? That’s the part I can’t figure out. His campaign promises are of course horrifying, but on the bright side, we know he’s a man who feels absolutely no obligation to keep his promises. He’s used to be socially liberal and I doubt his heart is really going to be in going after Planned Parenthood in a big way. The obvious role model for him would be Bush W, but I don’t think that playbook flies any more. If he antagonizes the Republican theocrats, then what? Work with Democrats?

Like everyone else, I at first thought the campaign was a money grab / publicity stunt because I didn’t think he was a viable candidate. Then he did well and it looked like he was taking it seriously, so I thought no more of it. But now I realize there’s another reason I thought his run was for publicity: because I can’t imagine why he would actually want to be president.

He is clearly completely uninformed on every single issue. Not qualified to take a guided tour of the White House, and he knows it. If he were to become the nominee I guarantee he would drop out and hand it to someone else, making up some story about “for personal reasons I would rather not discuss in public, blah blah blah”.

Trump would, in my opinion, be a very long way from George W. Bush. Bush was a lightweight, elected as the “MBA President” who would get out of the way and let the corporations make money, not rocking the boat of the post-Clinton boom. He wasn’t a huge showman or a huge personality, but was good at getting along with the business interests. Trump is… none of those things.

I believe he wants to be president because he wants to see how long the ride goes on for. As Orion points out, I think he did it for shits and giggles at first, but when he realised just how weak the opposition was, kept going.

As dhag85 points out, Trump would make a terrible President. I think that’s why people support him: they are now so divorced from reality that nobody sufficiently in touch with reality to govern, is acceptable to them. What they want is the Platonic ideal of an unreasonable egotist, and they found one.

I recently started reading Adam Gurowski’s diaries from the period of the American Civil War. I think this would be exactly your thing – Gurowski is admirably clear-headed, vindicated by history, refuses to give in to sentimentality like so many other writers, and brings a very Polish attitude to it. He understands, on a deep and implicit level, that this is a war fought for various different reasons and doesn’t conflate them. His views on the racial politics of the war stand out even in 2015 terms as being radical – and he wrote these in 1861.

Chaos in the refugee situation this week. About 90 minutes ago the police started doing mandatory border control in the southern parts of the country, following a political decision. Persons seeking asylum in the country will be permitted to enter. All other refugees will be denied entry. This is normally not allowed under the Schengen agreement, but 30-day exceptions are allowed for special situations. This will go on for 10 days initially, but will presumably be extended to the full 30 days. After that, it’s possible to extend it for another 30 days at a time if deemed necessary. They’ve said this is a highly temporary state. I’m expecting it to go on for years.

Currently I don’t know what the situation is with the Öresund bridge, which connects Sweden to Denmark. It has 17 000 daily commuters, so traffic stock there would be catastrophic.

Last week we had 10 000 new refugees enter the country. That’s 0.1% of the population of the entire country. It’s the equivalent of if 320 000 refugees were to arrive in the US in one week. Just last Monday it was 2160 people in one day.

From early reports it says they denied entry to 43 refugees within the first 15 minutes, between noon and 12.15 today. I can’t imagine what it’s like down there right now. Feel like I should go down there and help, but my wife is out of the country and I can’t leave the cats. Can the world fix itself soon?

I wasn’t quite sure where to put this, but I wanted to share. University of Chicago has shut down all activities (including classes) today because of an online threat. I don’t have any other details, except what is given in the link below, but it seems to be following the same pattern that we have seen with other recent events.

Update on the UChicago situation. They have someone in custody. Apparently, the threat was made in response to the shooting of Laquan McDonald. It’s unlikely that he would have been able to follow through on the threat, but it was still extremely detailed and obviously needed to be taken seriously.

Random question, but does anyone have any tips for dealing with sexism on Facebook? I’ve purposefully tried to keep from starting conversations about sexism and have limited my participation in ongoing conversations because I know Facebook is not really a great place to have those kinds of discussions. It’s not even sexist comments directed at anyone in particular (for the most part). I’m just getting really tired of seeing sexist memes pop up in my news feed. Today it was:

Arguing with a woman is like reading the software license agreement. In the end, you ignore everything and click “I agree.”

I really want to respond with:

This is sexist and insulting to both men and women. It paints women as uncompromisng and unwilling to listen and portrays men as being unable to make their own decisions.

The thing is, I know what’s coming if I do post that. “It’s just a joke.” “Don’t take it so seriously.” I’m not sure if I’m ready to deal with the backlash of calling someone out.

I’ve been screenshotting things and submitting them to facebooksexism.tumblr.com, but doing that has made me realize just how much sexism is out there. Even though I keep my friends list pretty selective, I’m still surprised by how much sexism pops up. I’ve submitted 13 photos less than 3 months and, no, I don’t submit everything I see. I just want people to think about what they are posting and what kind of messages they are sending, but I also know that Facebook is not really the best medium to facilitate these discussions.

I’m also aware that I’m going to be looking for a job soon (like within the next year) and I don’t want employers to be put off by a bunch of feminist posts. (And I hate that I have to think like that.)

I’m not on facebook, but in other bits of the internet where I’m faced with jokes I don’t like, posted by people I know, and my reply will probably be read by lots more people I *don’t* know:

I try to counter it with a follow-up joke. It has to demonstrate that (i) the original joke doesn’t really work, and (ii) yes, I know it’s a bloody joke.

This works quite well when the joke is of the form “X is like Y”, as in your example above — you can rely on pedantry or “I think you’ll find it’s not as simple as that” to demonstrate where it falls down. But after a while you start sounding like all those commenters that came out of the woodwork to nitpick the tea/consent analogy. YMMV.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.